Had coffee with a founder last week who said something that stuck with me:
"We've grown fast, promoted good people, but most of our management team has been in their roles less than two years."
I've seen this scaling challenge many times.
You elevate people from within because they know your culture and processes. But now they're learning leadership while managing complex projects.
Meanwhile, the institutional knowledge sits with one or two people at the top.
→ Every complex decision flows upward → Every non-routine situation needs senior input → The team is capable, but lacks pattern recognition → Growth becomes limited by senior leader capacity
The team is capable, but they haven't developed the judgment that comes from years of seeing patterns, making mistakes, and learning from edge cases.
Growth becomes limited by how much the senior leaders can personally handle.
This isn't a people problem. It's a systems problem.
The expertise exists. It's just trapped in a few heads instead of being systematically transferable.
That's where the real work happens - making invisible wisdom teachable.
It's a hard problem.